S K Y L I N E | 25 | Swimming (Again), A Colonial House, On the Road
S K Y L I N E | 25 | Swimming (Again), A Colonial House, On the Road
Plus: insecurity, capitalism, the Floating Pool Lady, Columbus in the middle, civic housekeeping, pedagogy, allusion, and more...
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The arrival of summer and the loosening of COVID-19 restrictions in the United States means that body movement is a thing again. We can roam more freely, though other places still have quarantines and restrictions in place. Three reviews show subjects in circulation across the city, continent, and planet, respectively. Then, dispatches. Finally, an ad and events, including a launch for the new issue of Cite, the publication I edit in Houston.
—Jack Murphy
Back in the Water
Marianela D’Aprile returns to her local pool in Chicago after a long absence.
The fieldhouse at McGuane Park is a pretty typical early ‘70s light-Brutalist building. There’s a smaller cylindrical concrete volume attached to a larger rectangular concrete volume. In the cylindrical volume, there’s a gym, a small office for staff, and a lobby. In the rectangular one, there’s a pool, three locker rooms, and at least one basketball court. I don’t know how many courts there are exactly because I’ve never gone inside the basketball court area. I only go to the fieldhouse to swim laps.
I stopped going in March of last year, when the pandemic caused the facility to close. I started going again this April, when the Chicago Parks District reopened the indoor pool for lap swimming. My second or third day back, a neighborhood woman—I don’t know her name, but I’ve seen her at the pool before—came into the locker room while I was changing and started taking pictures.
“SIX MILLION DOLLARS!” she hollered over and over. “Six million dollars, and they didn’t do nothin’!”
She was referring to the renovation of the fieldhouse, which took place mostly while it wasn’t in use due to COVID-19.
“I’m taking pictures because I want to show my friends. They didn’t do nothin’. Six million dollars, and they didn’t do nothin’.”
As far as I can tell, “nothing” isn’t quite accurate. There is new signage, new lobby furniture, some new finishes in the common areas, and I think they expanded the windows next to the pool.
But “nothing” might as well have been accurate, because whatever improvements were made don’t matter: I was back at the pool after thirteen months without it. Who cares about the renovation, and who cares what the building looks like? I just want to swim.
—Marianela D’Aprile
The Colonial Footprint of the Met
WAI Architecture Think Tank, in New York for the summer to teach a design seminar at GSAPP, reviews the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Imagine that someone invites you to their house, and once you step in, you see fetishized pictures of your family, your childhood toys, the spiritual artifacts your grandparents used to pray to, and even your kitchen utensils, hunting and construction tools. In one of the rooms, a series of large paintings show landscapes that are familiar to you, but, in a striking twist, they have removed any evidence of your neighbors and distant relatives that used to share these views, trees, and rivers.
Under the violently bucolic landscapes, a white square documents all sorts of information about the “authors” of these seductively fictitious images. The labels detail in black letters the life and achievements of the artists and how they have “discovered” the “wilderness,” while very little is said about the erasure of your civilization, as your culture is mentioned as a distant memory of a fading past. The deeper you venture into the house, the more you are confronted with familiar objects that have been decontextualized and turned into “artistic” fetishes. Deep inside you know that many of the laborers and craftspeople who assembled these artifacts would have never thought of them as artworks.
This house has an inaccurately but ideologically named “American Wing” that, adjacent to a European cluster of mainstream displays of religiosity, show works of settlers that are pompously displayed in brightly lit rooms, on tall pedestals, and within golden frames. As you walk through, you see fragments of buildings, temples, and drawings brutally decontextualized and iconoclastically displayed. On the other side of the house, many of the utensils, spiritual avatars, hunting instruments, and ceremonial devices of your planetary neighbors and relatives have been gathered together. Unlike the “American wing,” the items in this room are not put together because of geographic proximity, but rather by an obscure distance from the “enlightened” works of European and white Americans. As you venture in this room you wonder if you are still in the house or if you have been summoned to the “sunken place.” In this room of darkness, you learn that wooden effigies of Black bodies, masks shaped with the gold of Abya Yala, and the very familiar stone cemis (which you only knew from history books) have been gifted by the Rockefellers, the Fords, and many other benefactors and philanthrocapitalists who have no Arawak, Yoruba, or Mayan roots.
How could these people “own” your history and possess fragments of your life? You ask yourself this question in a deep state of confusion. You remember that these same benefactors were not only former proprietors of the pictures you had previously seen, but they also claimed ownership over the land in both past and present tenses. They claimed ownership of the landscapes before they became postcards that memorialized a troubling account of white-washed history through the disciplined oil brushstrokes on gypsum-primed canvases in a spectacle of settler-colonialist proportions. They continue to own large swaths of the earth—not only through the land they occupy with their house, their real estate, and their banks, but your land back in the colonized islands and other continental landscapes where they extract the matter that generates the wealth that allows them to fund and run their house full of the objects that they have stolen from you.
On your way out of their house, which you now realize is illegitimate, you scribble a mathematical formula on the back of your receipt to try to make sense of everything you saw. You title it “The Colonial Footprint of the Met.”
—Cruz Garcia & Nathalie Frankowski / WAI Architecture Think Tank
Encounters with American Earthworks
Ali Ismail Karimi files a review far from the usual coastal destinations. An excerpt:
When you’re in the middle of a 70,000-acre ranch (approximately half the size of Bahrain, where I live) in the middle of a sea of endless plains, then the intervention [of Amarillo Ramp] doesn’t seem particularly macho. The scale of everything here is so immense that nothing can contest it. Nothing compares to the sheer nothingness of the Panhandle. Smithson's ramp is not a monument; it’s a small act of authorship against a withering, wuthering vastness. It's a message in a bottle floating in the ocean, a gesture that marks the earth without chauvinism or bravado. It says “I was here,” but acknowledges that this makes no difference: “I was here, but so was everyone else.”
(Read the full text of Karimi’s review at the hyperlink above).
DISPATCHES
6/18 — OG KYSH
The Lower East Side gallery space776 is currently showing Architecture of Insecurity, an exhibition by the collaborative architecture office STUDIO KYSH—, co-founded by KYU YOUNG HUH and SEUNGHO PARK. Working through collage, photography, and models, STUDIO KYSH— presents a formal exploration of identity and the urban condition of immigrants in New York City. Most of the exhibition comprises cement sculptures that reconfigure the spatial articulation of masonry walls and openings in New York’s rowhouses. (One digital collage is also available as an NFT.) Each composition abstracts and breaks down components but retains the overall cadence of scale, openings, and articulation. The result is abstract yet familiar. Building on the tension between the generic and site-specific natures of New York’s facades, the resulting compositions distill the subject matter to an Escher-like tangle of mundane architectural ornamentation: stairs, cornices, pilasters, and so forth.
By reducing homes to their facade articulation, STUDIO KYSH— places the viewer outside, where the ornamentation and customization belie the psyche of the residents, many of them immigrants to New York, all of them looking to develop an identity within the city. From the artist’s statement: “Architectural elements of different origins, whether ornamental or functional, were melded together into idiosyncratic yet cohesive New York buildings. The Insecurity of the new city became the drive to develop a new identity.” Ultimately, the exhibit does little to draw conclusions about questions of social insecurity and architecture. Instead, it leaves the viewer with an open-ended prompt laid out in the accompanying text: “Does the reassembly of the architectural fragments give us an extreme New York City? With further abstraction, what do they become?”
—Lane Rick
6/19 — What to Start With? Capitalism!
The Architecture Beyond Capitalism School (ABC School), organized by The Architecture Lobby, originates from, in their words, “a desire within the Lobby to critically interrogate the structures and systems of power that have made change difficult within design professions and institutions, as well as from a belief that architecture schools do not teach what and how they could.” It began its six-week program on Juneteenth with four very different presentations all centered around the broad theme of capitalism.
The opening talk, delivered by ANA MARIA LEÓN and ANDREW HERSCHER of the Settler Colonial City Project, argued that the history of capitalism and the history of colonialism is the same history. RAJ PATEL used the 1750 Thomas Gainsborough painting Mr. and Mrs. Andrews and chicken nuggets to make an argument about how capitalism refuses to pay its bills. HUDA TAYOB identified Somali malls in Nairobi, Cape Town, and Minneapolis as examples of people finding ways not only to live livable lives but even build systems of care within societies dominated by ongoing precarity and racist capitalism. Finally, MATTHEW SOULES zeroed in on the financialization of architecture, arguing that today’s pencil towers are the apotheosis of this trend. The increasing prevalence of slenderness, he said, creates “de-socialized increments of speculative wealth storage” that render real estate, long considered one of the primary mediums for the absorption of capital, an increasingly liquid investment.
Lively discussion followed these four provocative presentations with the presenters engaging one another in thoughtful conversation and School participants asking insightful questions. The Q&A covered topics as specific as the conflict between industrial agriculture and affordable housing in Montana and the large-scale purchases of rental housing stock in Canada by a developer and as broad as questions of optimal theoretical frameworks and paths of resistance. Patel and León both urged participants to understand the system, but León argued that the avenues for resistance will not have market value that capitalism will understand.
The first session is the first result of the months of work that went into organizing the school. Mixed with salon discussions, following sessions will focus on Labor and Collective Practice. (Note: I am on the school’s organizing committee.) Additional coverage of subsequent events is expected in NYRA.
—Palmyra Geraki
6/21—Let’s Go Swimming (NYC Waterfront Dub)
"Henry, if I bring a floating pool to New York will you take it?" recalled ANN BUTTENWIESER regarding a conversation with a city official about her quest to bring New York the Floating Pool Lady—a barge with a public pool built into it. She was in conversation with REGINA MEYER, former President of Brooklyn Bridge Park, and CAROL WILLIS, Director of the Skyscraper Museum, about Buttenwieser's new book The Floating Pool Lady.
A primary holdup for many was a deep-seated aversion to open waterfront access: "The idea of public access was controversial, questioned, and at times poo pooed," said Buttenwieser. Today docked at Barretto Point Park in the Bronx, the Floating Pool Lady first arrived in Brooklyn in 2006, heralding a decade of shoreside improvements. Next up? Stop dumping sewage in the East River: "Then we could swim in the river!"
—Nicolas Kemper
6/21 — Many Middles
“I find myself working at the boundaries of Architecture, the blurry boundaries where Architecture meets culture.” —MIMI ZEIGER
Last Monday, Mimi Zeiger presented the organizing framework and some of the projects in the upcoming version of Exhibit Columbus. Curated by Zeiger and IKER GIL, its theme—New Middles—probes two characteristics of Columbus, Indiana: its many “middles” (watersheds, Native American tribal lands, and modernisms, in addition to the present being suspended between past and future) and its history’s missing narratives, ripe for investigation. The Exhibit Columbus team selected thirteen participants this year, resulting in a variety of types of projects, including folly-like objects meant to attract wildlife and speak to the historic biodiversity of Columbus’s ecosystems; interactive installations that use AR environments to recall an exhibition of African art first hosted by Bartholomew County Public Library (designed by I.M. PEI) in January 1970; a project that takes on Thomas More’s Utopia and European Modernism, by way of a billboard à la Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown; a classroom that asks what post-pandemic learning might look like; and The Midnight City, which asks questions about workers who finish their day after the sun has gone down and a new kind of city has emerged.
These are just the projects Zeiger presented as part of her lecture; even with this selection it’s clear that the individual efforts themselves take on a wide breadth of questions. As a curatorial project, New Middles seems set to both ask essential questions about what it means to be “in the middle” as well as actively push to find the middle’s boundaries. The theme’s cleverness constructs an ambiguous center around which exhibition participants/designers can tether themselves. Of course, that center is the city of Columbus itself. Exhibit Columbus will open on August 21 and run until November 28.
—Charles Weak
6/22 — Housekeeping in the City
If the League Prize’s theme of Housekeeping suggests a domestic, intimate scope, the second night of presentations expanded it to the scale of the city. In the work of New York-based AGENCY-AGENCY (presented by founder TEI CARPENTER) and Mexico City-based APRDELESP (presented by RODRIGO ESCANDÓN CESARMAN and RICARDO ROXO MATIAS), architecture becomes defined by its role as infrastructure for urban life. Carpenter’s projects highlighted the “transformative potentials” of commonplace urban objects altered to take on new architectural forms and functions, such as with a hydrant becoming a water fountain, or concrete barriers holding verdant pollinating spaces. In APRDELESP’s presentation, the firm rejected the traditional framework of practicing in a private, singular office, instead offering several “subspaces,” public-oriented spaces—cafes, shops, a radio station—which act as extensions of their own workspace.
Each firm works in distinct cultural contexts, uses different representational tools, and operates in their own respective modes. Yet both radiate a similarly quiet, subtle radicality in their work; they practice within more conventional boundaries of architecture while subverting and pushing against the grain. For Carpenter, this means working with objects and types in ways that are “familiar, yet new” as to reintegrate them into neighborhoods and streets with ease. For APRDELESP, they attempt to make the design process “less precious and pretentious,” in turn making the architecture itself more accessible to the community. As a result, a building’s housekeeping becomes inherently social and reliant on those who use it. While such a position relinquishes control and leaves us “vulnerable,” in Matias’s words, the end result is a more equitable means of producing architecture.
—Harish Krishnamoorthy
6/22 — Translations from Students to Professors and Other Issues
The decision to teach "was a conscious decision to integrate theoretical work into my weekly routines," said LANE RICK, principal and co-founder of Office of Things and regular NYRA contributor, at Yale Women in Architecture's "Teaching Practice | Practice Teaching" panel on Tuesday. Four Yale alums—MARION WEISS of Weiss/Manfredi, LISE ANNE COUTURE of Asymptote Architecture, BRITTANY UTTING of HOME-OFFICE, and Rick—joined moderator NINA RAPPAPORT in a discussion about the relationship between their practices and pedagogical pursuits. Each shared seven-minute presentations of their offices' work, ranging from installations to multi-block urban parks, as well as their students' projects. Phrases such as "contemporary conditions," "relationships to culture and to each other," and "technology" reoccurred throughout, as did Amazon as a studio prompt.
Asked why and how they got into pedagogy, all participants agreed that teaching was something they actively sought out. "I graduated feeling deeply aware of what I did not learn and went into teaching for selfish reasons; I wanted to teach because I wanted to create that framework where the imperative for learning would never end," said Weiss. Yet questions on whether being trained to teach was important, or what it means to teach architecture, were met with collective uncertainty. Rick’s comment that "there is always a messy translation between what the professors are thinking students want and need to learn and what the students want and need to learn," was affirmed with nods. "Winging it," as one does in practice and "in life in general," was a common approach to instruction. Such an approach is bound to have consequences, but the panel discussion showed a generation of pedagogues bent on examining them, who see students as individuals to reciprocally learn from and are interested in creating spaces of support.
—Tiffany Xu
6/24 — Interior Immersions
Last Thursday, CAN VU BUI and LANE RICK of Office of Things gave an in-person lecture at Sang’s (a bodega/test kitchen/cultural space on the edge of Brooklyn and Queens) as part of a series of talks series curated and moderated by DAVID BENCH of Inca. Beginning by illustrating themes found throughout the practice’s work with canonical references, Rick and Bui positioned ideas about frames and their absence; tactile, visual, and aural perceptions of space; and the effects of time on materials and place. They borrowed Denise Scott Brown’s concept of “allusion,” an idea that lingers, perhaps unconsciously, in the work of a designer. “Most of the photos we took ourselves,” said Bui. “Architects tend to shy away from memory and experience in favor of a study of the canon and precedent[. …] For us, the tactility of seeing precedent in person is set in our memory.”
Another lingering question that emerged from the work dealt with the relationship between space and technology. This was clearly examined in the Immersive Space Series, five office relaxation spaces completed for Google over the last five years. While acting as “places to disconnect from technology,” each chamber contains audio and lighting experiences specifically calibrated to the room’s formal aspects. This duality of mental and corporeal perception also motivates Soft Screen, a video wall occupying an entire lobby wall in YouTube’s headquarters. The enlarged size of the video alone shifts the technology’s relationship to the viewer as one moves through the lobby and the video content changes. The design also works even when the screen is off: “[There’s] nothing worse than a blue screen in a corporate lobby,” Bui said.
The practice recently completed the renovation of a 1920s residence in Glendale, Queens. While Immersive Spaces and Soft Screen both eschewed the frame, here a series of monumental archways, softened with color, opened the formerly divided spaces of the home. Thinking back to the initial allusions, when asked on what they understand to be the “thing” in their practice name, Rick said that they ask “how do you relate to things, to the built environment”—to which Bui followed: “We don’t have a singular approach; it varies with scale without regard to a singular purchase of an idea.”
—Nicholas Raap
OUR VERY FIRST AD!
Are you in New York and tired of working next to the dishwasher? Jonathan Kirschenfeld, founder of the Institute for Public Architecture, has availability in his co-working space! Design co-workspace in the heart of Flatiron/Gramercy with 50′ south-facing windows. Workstations (two 5′ surfaces) are $950, 208 sf office is $2250, and office with direct access from elevator corridor $2100/mo.
Conference/storage/kitchen/filtered water/fiber internet/weekly cleaning included.
Email jonathan@kirscharch.com for inquiries.
THE WEEK AHEAD
Monday, 6/28
Designing Urban Agriculture 1: Why Now? with Michael Hollis, Valentine Cadieux, Rodney Brooks, Ian Marvy
12:00 PM | AIA New York
From STUD to Stalled!: Queer Space 1996–2016 with Joel Sanders, Mario Gooden
12:00 PM | Architectural League of New York
Wentworth Woodhouse: The Largest 18th Century Palace in Britain with Oliver Gerrish, Sarah McLeod
12:00 PM | Institute of Classical Architecture & Art
The Poetics of Sanctuary and Place: Paul R. Williams with LeRonn P. Brooks, Marrikka Trotter
5:00 PM | SCI-Arc
Tuesday, 6/29
America's Civic Stage: A Vision to Celebrate Pennsylvania Avenue with Heather Arnold, Hany Hassan, Helen Marriage, Anita Morrison, Laurie Olin, Jeffrey Tumlin, Cathleen McGuigan
12:00 PM | National Capital Planning Commission
League Prize 2021: Night 3 with Lindsey May, Ilse Cárdenas, Regina de Hoyos, Diego Escamilla, Juan Luis Rivera
6:00 PM | Architectural League of New York
Wednesday, 6/30
Epistemic Shifts: Rethinking Historiographies of African Architecture and Urbanism with Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, Delia Duong Ba Wendel, Itohan Osayimwese, Ikem Okoye
11:00 AM | Canadian Centre for Architecture
PK Das & Associates with P.K. Das, Samarth Das
11:30 AM | Columbia GSAPP
Give a Box of Tricks (to someone who lives with another generation)
1:00 PM | Canadian Centre for Architecture
Namely, Words: A discussion with Sam Jacob, Tony Fretton, Peter Wilson
2:00 PM | Betts Project
Cite 102 Launch Event with Reto Geiser, Dung Ngo, Herman Dyal, Maria Nicanor, Jack Murphy
6:00 PM | Rice Design Alliance
Architectural League 140th Annual Meeting & Henry Cobb Address with Paul Lewis, Rosalie Genevro, Renée Cheng
6:00 PM | Architectural League of New York
If you would like to write up one of these events—or any others of interest—please get in touch at editor@nyra.nyc.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
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Four desk editors run NYRA: Alex Klimoski, Phillip Denny, Carolyn Bailey & Nicolas Kemper (who also serves as the publisher). They rotate duties each month.
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